Robert  A.  Heinlein

STRANGER 
IN  A  STRANGE  LAND

        (1961)
        ISBN-10: 0441788386
       
       reviewed by Patrick Killough

(1) biblio.com 07/31/2011

Would you recommend this book to other readers?  * * * (Might)

review:

Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND is a clear example of the "didactic" novel. It teaches, it preaches, its characters rant and debate, parry and thrust. Its story is not much. But its message resonated with millions of confused "searchers" for meaning in the turbulent 1960s and even into the cooler, more blase 1970s.

Valentine Michael Smith, after his pioneering parents died opening up Mars, was raised by Martians as close to a Martian as he could be. A later expedition from Earth to Mars found young Mike Smith and returned him home. Meanwhile the ostensibly pacifistic Martians, it is hinted throughout the novel, are planning something nasty for the Earth and earthlings. Mike seeks for a way to defend the Earth without tipping  his hand to the alien race that raised him.

Smith goes through one cross-cultural shock after another, eventually deciding that he can prepare earthlings to resist suspected Martian imperialism by making it attractive for them to learn selectively features of Martian civilization (ceremony of sharing water, thinking empathetically aka "grokking" and others) while going beyond even the Martians by adopting a new Smith-created religion, Church of All The Worlds.

Smith's intially sceptical admirer is crusty old libertarian lawyer Jubal E. Harshaw. Via dialogs and monologs of Harshaw, author Heinlein criticizes received human religions, mores, thought processes, nudity, clothing and more from a Martian point of view -- as filtered through hybrid Martian-Human Mike Smith.

The level of argumentation ranges somewhere between 1960s American 7th grade and college sophomore, arguably, on balance, sub-adult. But STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND proved wildly attractive to an increasingly rootless, restless generation of young Americans thirsting for they knew not what, eager to grok and to say, "I am only and egg" and "Thou art God."  Study STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND not as literature but as 1960s sociology. -OOO-

http://www.biblio.com/books/415674732.html
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(2) lunch.com  07/31/2011

name of review: In the 60s everyone wanted to "grok."

rating: * * *

review:

In retrospect, Robert A. Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND seems quaintly sub-adult in its message, not much of a story, a very average "didactic" novel. In its decade, be it admitted, the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s, STRANGER was on everyone's lips. Even today, in 2011, it is selling more strongly than probably 90% of the books still in print. What was its astonishing appeal 30 and 40 years ago? What gives it staying power, even if fading?
 
From what I gather, it was kids in 7th grade and higher and college students sophomore or younger who were initially most represented among those turned on by STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. The novel "liberated" them, taught them to "think for themselves." Today those same people may vaguely recall STRANGER as a seminal book in their growing up but forget the reasons why it moved them. Historians of American culture build careers by probing cultural phenomena such as STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, comic books, anime, the noir and other fashions in writing as providing insights into what nowadays seems an increasingly ancient American -- largely juvenile -- mind set.

An American raised as a Martian on Mars by Martians is brought back in young adulthood to Earth by a follow-on expedition to the earlier one of which young Valentine Michael "Mike" Smith is the only survivor. Mentally, physically and emotionally, Smith is less cross-culturally prepared to become a mainstream human among humans than is a Peace Corps volunteer for coping with baboons in the outback of Burkina Faso.

As the Mars expedition's sole survivor and heir of wealthy parents, Smith has claims to colossal wealth, which crooked politicians wish to deny him. He also has no experience of other earth people, especially earth women.

In the remainder of STRANGER IN STRANGE LAND Smith first demonstrates alien skills such as "grokking" persons and objects, i. e., cognitively reaching their inner cores through empathetic attention paying. Mars is a dry planet and water is rare. When a nurse brings him a glass of water, Smith is bound to her through Martian water-sharing ritual.

He then begins consciously to share with and teach to earth men his skills, attitudes and values. Mike taps into latent human critical abilities, making Martian values so appealing as to inspire previous non-noticers of what they have been doing all their lives to overthrow traditional values such as walking around clothed rather than nude, having sex monogamously and without guilt. Smith teaches that generally doing what one jolly well pleases is good. This culminates in Smith's new-fangled religion. the Church of All The Worlds.

In the 60s STRANGER introduced young people to systematic noticing what they were doing and then asking "why."  They grokked. They proclaimed themselves "only an egg" and assured their chums that "You are God." They solemnly shared water with one another.

Socrates had done a suprerficially similar but more philosophical thing with the youth of Athens and paid for it with his life. So in the end would Mike Smith, consciously sacrificing himself to a mob with an eye to toughening up his followers to face a vague threat from Martian Ancients. For those ancients would surely do unspecified bad things to earth people once they started paying the disgusting earthlings more heed.

The book is clumsily written, abounds with cliches, postures and rhetorical strutting, one dimensional characters and is of interest primarily to literary historians. Readers would do better to tackle some Socratic dialogs of Plato or a handful tales of C.S. Lewis, take up Rudyard Kipling's JUST SO STORIES or even the Mars tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. Far, far better, in my opinion, might they do.  -OOO-


http://www.lunch.com/reviews/book/UserReview-Stranger
_in_a_Strange_Land-1543565-210975-In_the_60s_
everyone_wanted_to_grok_.html
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(3) bn.com  08/01/2011

title of review: STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND was "the first love" of millions

rating: * * *

review:

Posted 8/1/2011:

I was 75 years old when I first read Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 novel STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. It did very little for this reader. But then I was an old man and I had even in high school read other didactic, even philosophical and theological novels. Why had this book so electrified early post-Eisenhower America?

Then I thought more deeply into my own teens when I was simultaneously enjoying having crushes on my first girl friends while being electrified by Ray Bradbury's THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and C. S. Lewis's trilogy: OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, PERELANDRA and THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH. I was wild for these and other tales. Those books made me think fresh thoughts, led me to argue for my personal tastes against my far better informed Jesuit teachers in Shreveport, wonder if my points of view weren't as good as anyone else's. Those were proud rebel years! And a decade later other young people reacted similarly to Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.

So to be fair to people reveling in first loves, let me "grok" (a favorite word of STRANGER's hero Valentine Michael "Mike" Smith) those youngsters who fell in love with a book for the first time when reading Robert A. Heinlein. Never mind that Heinlein did what he did clumsily, verbosely and spoke through the mouths of a bunch of one-dimensional characters, including the crusty, conceited old lawyer

"Jubal E. Hardshaw, LL.B, M.D., ScD., bon vivant, gourmet, sybarite ... and neo-pessimist philosopher" (Ch. 10).

While Hardshaw busily tore down everything personally disagreeable in American life, Smith, a naive, innocent young human raised as a Martian by Martians was busy introducing Americans to an uplifting way to think about themselves and love one another.

Mike Smith taught people to "grok" and to enjoy "grokking," reaching cores and essences of things and persons through intuitive empathy. He taught them the spirit of Martian water-sharing ritual. Smith's disciples learned to look at one another and say, "You are God" while modestly purring of themselves, "I am only an egg." In STRANGERS Heinlein deliberately weaned readers from inherited, hitherto uncriticized sacred beliefs and mores. He helped end Puritanism in America.

Who can say for sure what chords the fictitious interactions of Smith, Hardshaw and other characters in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND plucked in millions of young souls? Suddenly they felt within themselves the power of Socrates and his followers in ancient Athens. With Plato they believed they had been looking all their young lives at shadows in a dark cave when there was true light and reality outside that cave: the sun. Heinlein set them free to speak their own minds about parents, schools, religions, societies. No small achievement. And much of American society said, yes, amen

-OOO-

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/stranger-in-a-strange-land
-robert-a-heinlein/1002986393?ean=9780441788385&itm=
1&usri=stranger%2bin%2ba%2bstrange%2bland%2boriginal%
2buncut%2bversion
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(4) amazon.com   06/07/2011

title of review: STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND and Arguing for Ethics

rating: * * *

review:

A first love stays in memory long after he or she has been replaced by someone better, smarter, more loyal, more generous. But there is something forever unique about first loves. No book proves that better to millions of young readers from 1961 onward than Robert A. Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. Mike Smith, a naive human raised on Mars by Martians. returns to earth. He is protected from greedy politicians and rapacious religious leaders by a selfish, loud-mouthed, well educated sybaritic lawyer Jubal E. Hardshaw. As the nominally science fiction novel moves tediously forward, it morphs into a series of pseudo-dialogs between Hardshaw and one inept interlocutor after another.

By novel's end, thousands of earthlings have been persuaded to join Mike's new religion of sexual freedom, water-sharing, thinking of oneself as a Martian egg and of others as God. And everyone tries to grok: i.e. to intuit empathetically and lovingly the essences of one another and of inanimate objects. "'Thou art God,' Mike said agreeably, 'God groks.'" (p. 206, Ch. 21). This is said to a devout Muslim appalled by the blasphemies of Martian-human hybrid, Valentine Michael "Mike" Smith.

The obvious danger that an old man like myself sees in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND is that the novel become in many minds something more than one modest step in a progression of self-discovery and spiritual growth that leads on to books and writers characterized by harder, more exact thinking (Plato comes to mind, as do Sigmund Freud, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Ronald Knox, Paul of Tarsus and on and on). Heinlein's STRANGER only becomes dangerous when it is elevated into a permanent stopping point for people content with simple solutions instead of a first, imperfect love pointing to deeper needs and thirsts that Heinlein cannot assuage.

Heinlein, that poor man's latter-day Socrates, came across to many rebellious youth in the early 60s as the first person ever to notice that most people's ways of behavior and values in daily action have simply been uncritically inherited, like their languages, from parents, teachers, religious leaders and society at large. Mores and ethics have never been argued for in the experience of just about anyone in terms of what is good for human nature. Behavior is good because God or the tribe says so.

Heinlein, like Socrates, says it doesn't have to be that way. We have the power to make up our own ethics, religions and worship gods of our own imagining. Simple as that. Simple, inadequate, indeed; but one remembers forever him who first showed her how to think new, critical thoughts. First loves only seem to last forever. As we mature, first loves yield to higher, better loves.

-OOO-

https://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/
ABABCND8BHUXC?ie=UTF8&ref_=cm_cr_thx_pdp
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(5) epinions.com  08/02/2011

Review Title:  Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND: still going strong -- strangely, very strangely!
BOTTOM LINE:  If you have already read STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, ask yourself "Did it change my life?"
If so, why? If not, why not.
Haven't read it? Don't bother.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

At age 75 I have recently read for the first time Robert A. Heinlein's weakly science fictional novel of 1961, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.

In high school in Shreveport in the early 1950s I read an early Heinlein juvenile tale or two without much joy. My sci-fi hero in those years was Ray Bradbury and for didactic novels doing theology and philosophy I relished C. S. Lewis's trilogy, OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, PERELANDRA and THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH. Down the decades my personal bent toward any form of science fiction went limp.

Recently a couple of a bit younger friends told me how STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND had transformed their lives when it burst onto the scene in the early 60s when America was still comfortable with former President Ike Eisenhower and young people for the last time tended to accept without protest the religion, manners, work ethic and mores of their economically successful parents.

So I read STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.

As literature I ranked in somewhere in the vicinity of BOMBA THE JUNGLE BOY or SUPERMAN comics. As philosophy STRANGER came across as Socrates Lite but as Ultra-lite to the vanishing point. As religion, good grief! I don't need pseudo-Martian water-sharing ceremonies, humbly calling myself a Martian egg, revering everyone else as "Thou art God," or having guiltless sex with every congenial human in reach.

The novel's stranger in a strange land is young Valentine Michael "Mike" Smith. Smith was raised on Mars by Martians after his parents and everyone else on a pioneering exploration had perished. A couple of decades later a second expedition retrieves Smith, who has apparently been given title to everything on The Red Planet by  Martian Ancients who barely notice the human intruders.

On earth, through a series of clumsy encounters with a nurse and a journalist, initially cross-culturally helpless Mike Smith finds a protector and mentor. He is a self-absorbed curmudgeonly old lawyer
 
"Jubal E. Hardshaw, LL.B, M.D., ScD., bon vivant, gourmet, sybarite ... and neo-pessimist philosopher" (Ch. 10).

From their introduction onward, Hardshaw increasingly shoves Smith aside in a duel for readers' attention. Hardshaw complains, pontificates, leaks cliche's like a colander and engages in one-sided debate some of the lamest interlocutors in all literature.

So why did so many thousands find STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND liberating? Why do reviewers on other internet sites claim that they have read a barely average (on its intrinsic merits) novel as many as thirty times? It is reader fascination, then and now, with STRANGER that deserves attention, not the novel itself.

My guess is that there comes a time in every young life, somewhere one side or another, perhaps, of puberty, when a person decides that he or she is confused and not getting what he deserves from parents, school, church, country or flag. She wants and feels she deserves much better.

Comes a writer of words or songs with a simple message and that message hits consciousness like a thunderbolt or like a crush on one's first girl friend. There has never been any experience like it. The youngster hugs the revelation to her bosom as if a beloved rag doll. She will not let it go. She abides no rivals, learns nothing new, does not look for new foods to sate growing spiritual hungers. This is IT forever and ever and ever. Amen!

Meanwhile, down the centuries from Socrates through Saint Augustine through Shakespeare, Freud and C.S. Lewis, other prophets have arisen with profounder insights. The best thing that can happen to youngsters who are first awoken to something like a life in philosophizing by reading STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND is that they not dwell long with Heinlein, the monumental over-simplifier. A  wise adult will cherish outgrown first love Heinlein while not denying the faults both as writer and thinker that caused the youngster to move beyond STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.

Beyond grokking there is something out there far, far better for all of us. As Augustine put it:

"Our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in Thee.

-OOO-

post scriptum comment:

I tried to persuade the two epinions gatekeepers for BOOKS to allow me to review STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND as a book. I learned that there were plenty of reviewers who had done this before me, that STRANGER was still listed somewhere in that increasingly infinite ether of epinions, the dread "Product info temporarily unavailable."

So, folks, Writers Corner is the best that occurs to me to inspire you, I hope, to comment and tell us all what STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND meant to you both once upon a time and now.

Cordially, AOHCAPABLANCA

http://www.epinions.com/content_5542944900
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http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/heinlein_stranger.html